Friday, December 8 at 7:30 PM
gushes aka jennae santos
Delicious Collision I
Delicious Collision I is a multimedia choreographic song cycle to the first chapter of gushes' unreleased art rock album and new Filipinx mythology. Delicious Collision refers to a series of portals— psychedelic convergences of ancestral, elemental, queer, erotic, and warrior spirits whose dance maps pathways through birth and death cycles for unbound expressions of liberation. The primordial womb melts, an oyster splits, carnations burst, and a guitar smashes 2 portals open. Conjured from fisher folklore, climate erosion, drag, pro wrestling, Kali FMA, and the Indigenous Filipino concept of Kapwa, this immersive, allegorical ceremony beckons intimate within epic.
Ankita sharma: dhoka/Betrayal/GodUnspoken
dhoka entangles Hindu goddess Kali’s ultimate power and destructive nature with present-day authoritarianism and religious violence, using myth to unpack how Hinduism has been shaped into propaganda for nationalism by Western influence. Tracing Kali’s deification, dhoka accompanies her transformation into a colonized, fetishized, destructive image that upholds violence with her bloodied tongue. The work lives at the fringes of reality and genre, letting the epic and human dance together: a physical exploration of how worship can distort what something stands for.
About the artists
Jennae Santos aka gushes (she/they) is a story-oriented interdisciplinary music and performance artist born in the Bay Area, based in Brooklyn, with ancestral roots across the Philippines archipelago. Fed by Indigenous Filipino psychology and combat, the feminist occult, plant medicine, coastal ecologies, and animal architecture poeticized through the lens of genderqueer fluidity, decolonization, bloodlines, myth8making, love songs, and pleasure autonomy, they produce collaborative performance incarnations spanning chamber prog rock band, movement cycle, tea ceremony, drone, ritualized theatre, video, sensory installation, sound sculpture and other multimedia intersections under progressive art-rock project, gushes, and social practice partnership, Tree+Oyster.
Ankita Sharma (they/them) is a performance artist invested in world-making where content dictates genre and betrays expectation. Their creations unpack systems and symptoms of power from a queer, punk solidarity-based lens that rehearses freedom in body and mind. In aesthetic, their work is grungy, confrontational, and cheeky, a dance-horror, with physicality rooted in contemporary dance-theater and South Asian and African diasporic forms. Ankita’s work has been at venues including Denver Art Museum, The Basement, The Tank, and LaGuardia Performing Arts Center. They were past MNE ECS Recipients, Performance Project and LEIMAY Fellows, and recipients of the Broadway League and Overton Memorial Award.